They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Those closer to the coalface of Anderson’s Scotland Yard hazard a similar view. William Joyce, the police administrator at Dublin Castle, is quoted to that effect by the Irish historian Leon O Brion in his account of the Parnell conspiracy. ‘When Pigott ran away,’ he writes, ‘the question was asked whether he had really died by his own hand or had been assassinated.’ Joyce was emphatic that ‘Soames got Pigott away, helped by one of the law-agents and by the Royal Irish Constabulary officials who had surveillance over Pigott.’ This substantially corroborates La Vanguardia’s claim that an Irish copper was staying with Pigott in the same hotel. ‘He [Joyce] adds that in government circles a sigh of relief went up when Pigott’s death was made public. If he had lived, he might have opened his mouth too wide.’

  Richard Pigott was a big-mouth who knew everything and would have sold it to anyone at the right price; and failing that would have shopped the fucking lot of them to save his own skin. He and Thomas Maguire had the goods on Anderson and his chums, and within twenty-four hours of each other both were dead.

  REYNOLD’S NEWS – MARCH 3 1889

  MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF A TIMES WITNESS – Dr. Maguire, of Dublin, whose name had often been mentioned in the course of the investigation before the Parnell Commission, died suddenly and mysteriously the other day [Saturday, 2 March] in London. It was stated in evidence that the deceased accompanied Mr Houston to Paris to obtain the letters from Pigott, and advanced money for their purchase. There were two medical examinations of the body at 72, Eaton Terrace, and the medical gentlemen stated that they found the death due to natural causes.

  This naturally wasn’t accepted by anyone who could count recent corpses. In Parliament, an Irish MP by the name of Thomas O’Hanlon was inquisitive, and put a question to the Home Secretary: ‘Owing to the fact that Doctor Maguire may have had poison administered to him, will the right hon. gentleman see that a post-mortem examination is held?’

  Hansard records: ‘No answer was given to this question.’

  This put no end to the suspicion over the Maguire/Pigott deaths. Many years later, when at least a part of Anderson’s criminal input was revealed, the journalist George R. Sims taunted in his column, ‘Now that Robert Anderson is becoming so communicative with regard to the mysteries of the past, he may, perhaps, in a future statement, tell us the true story of the death of Pigott?’

  Again, no answer is recorded.

  It was Sims, incidentally, who received one of those beguiling bum steers so beloved of Ripperology. Like ‘the Swanson Marginalia’ and ‘the Macnaghten Memorandum’, it is reverentially referred to as ‘the Littlechild Letter’. The copper who never caught the Whitechapel Fiend, and squandered no time trying to, is now thrashing away on his Underwood with a solution. While his letter has charm as memorabilia, it’s worthless as anything else.

  Bro Littlechild (Zetland Lodge 511) introduced another non sequitur into the Ripper jamboree with the name of Dr Tumblety, a candidate so silly I’m not even going to bother to dismiss it. The rest of the text (presumably in expectation of Sims tossing a quote into his column) plunges into fantasy. ‘With regard to the term “Jack the Ripper”,’ writes Littlechild, ‘it was generally believed in the Yard that Tom Bullen [sic] of the Central News [Agency] was the originator.’ Oh, really? It was certainly Bulling who made useful adjustments to Jack’s ‘Moab’ letter, but to credit him with ‘Dear Boss’ is expecting a little too much servitude from ink.

  Meanwhile, drama was unfolding at the Commission. Parnell’s counsel, Sir Charles Russell, had demanded that the books and accounts of the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union be presented in evidence. But the judges refused. It was apparently acceptable to present forged letters and the bitter fictions of ‘Parnellism and Crime’ on behalf of the prosecution, but documents vital to the defence were out of bounds.

  These records contained, and of course could prove, the complicity of every Right Honourable shithouse in the book responsible for the financing and framing of Parnell. They represented precisely the scandalous head-count that Pigott and Maguire knew only too well – or rather, knew until they terminally forgot.

  Truth couldn’t quite cope with these ILPU records, and the judges’ refusal to allow them as evidence caused Russell and his team to walk out. The Commission then collapsed in everything but name, Her Majesty’s judges being obliged to sit through six more months of this junk on their own. Her Majesty’s opposition went through the usual sham of outrage, promising a full inquiry on their return to power, with sonorous commitments to a full exposure of whoever was behind Pigott. By tradition, nothing came of it; there was no revelation of the guilty, presumably because nobody wanted to arrest themselves. Lessons would naturally be learned, of course (the standard mantra of the culpable), but no lesson would ever be taught.

  And what of ‘Parnellism and Crime’? The public now knew who had faked the letters, but who had cooked up the articles on which this conspiracy was forged? Russell had repeatedly asked representatives of The Times who wrote the poisonous rubbish, and Soames and James Cameron MacDonald, the paper’s manager, just as repeatedly denied any knowledge of his identity. From this miasma of perjury a name was at last to emerge. The son of an Irish judge, John Woulfe Flanagan, was finally admitted as the penman of ‘Parnellism and Crime’, although his co-author, responsible for ‘Behind the Scenes in America’, remained a mystery. Among the principal actors behind the government’s now seized machine there were many who could have resolved it, but none more qualified than Robert Anderson. However, the Chief of Police was never asked, nor did he ever appear before the Commission. ‘In view of all this,’ he later wrote, if ‘the reader expects me to solve the mystery why I was not a witness at the Special Commission he will be disappointed. The more I review the circumstances, the more impenetrable does that mystery become.’

  It was Anderson’s kind of ‘mystery’, just as Bro Jack was Warren’s. But ‘mystery’ is a misuse of language: the salient word is ‘conspiracy’. Not my choice in this instance, but that of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, who wrote to Sir Charles Russell two days after Pigott’s ‘suicide’: ‘My Dear Russell. I can’t help writing you a line to congratulate you on your part in the destruction of what you quite properly described as a “foul conspiracy”.’

  A knighthood for Robert Anderson, and another twenty-one years, were to pass before more of the odour seeped out. ‘It was a foul, terrible, subtle, and powerful conspiracy,’ declared T.P. O’Connor in Parliament, ‘which was woven around our liberties, our characters, and perhaps our lives.’ He was referring to ‘Parnellism and Crime’, and then more specifically to the lies called ‘Behind the Scenes in America’: ‘… seeking to blast the reputation of the Irish leader and the Irish party by charging them with association with crime, to organise these crimes, and to endeavour to entrap the labour leaders in America into conspiracy of the same character’.

  So who exactly was the author of ‘Behind the Scenes in America’, a unique felony constituting ‘one of the greatest scandals ever known in police administration in this country’?

  Please step forward our old God-stained friend and chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, the Christian Charlatan and Pulpiteer himself, SIR ROBERT ANDERSON. Anderson had written ‘Behind the Scenes in America’, and then went about the business of prosecuting Charles Parnell for its content. Could anything be more corrupt? Could anything be more disgusting than this confederacy of bewigged pimps and their craven little minions in helmets? Most certainly yes. It was called ‘the trial of Florence Maybrick’. Anderson had concocted his American fictions in association with his buddy Edward Caulfield Houston. In court, The Times’s manager MacDonald repeatedly denied that he knew the author’s name. ‘It was the work of several writers,’ he insisted, and he hadn’t the vaguest idea of who they might be. It had obviously slipped his mind that he’d written to one of them only a few weeks before. On 10 January 1889, fourteen days after the Ripper had made one
of his more egregiously Masonic hits in Bradford, MacDonald wrote: ‘Dear Mr Anderson, if your man is not available as quickly as steam can carry him the case will have been virtually concluded & that section of it embraced in your articles no longer needful to be gone into.’ My emphasis, but Anderson’s ‘articles’. MacDonald continued with an urgent plea for the immediate importation of one of Anderson’s American-based narks: ‘That immediately upon his arrival in England he shall make in writing and sign a complete full statement of everything and every circumstance within his knowledge which shall substantially prove when given in evidence the several statements and allegations contained in XXXX [sic] or alleged in several articles published in The Times newspaper in the year 1887 entitled “Behind the Scenes in America”.’

  I think even the most dispassionate observer would conclude that MacDonald had known for at least two years who was the writer of ‘Behind the Scenes in America’.

  Sometimes I left my typewriter feeling bilious after a day with these people. The whole damned lot of them, beginning with Robert Anderson, should have been slung into prison. A farce it may have been, and owned by the elite it was, but this was the ‘law in action’ at the time of the ‘Parnell Commission’:

  1) The fabrication of false evidence with intent to mislead a judicial tribunal is an indictable misdemeanour punishable with imprisonment.

  2) All acts which are calculated to interfere with the course of justice, are misdemeanours at the common law, punishable with imprisonment.

  3) A conspiracy to prevent, obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice is a criminal conspiracy [in respect of] wilfully producing false evidence to the court or by publishing information that may prejudicially affect the minds of the jurors [in this case judges]. A conspiracy to charge a man falsely with a crime, also falls within this category. And any combination which has for its object the perversion of true justice is a criminal conspiracy and indictable as such.

  But only if you were Irish.

  The man MacDonald and his newspaper were anxious to rush before the Commission went by the name of Major Henri Le Caron.

  Le Caron was a kind of fleshless Pigott with an American accent, and plying similar wares. He’d been exchanging secret correspondence with Anderson for twenty-five years – virtually all of it dross, but lapped up by his paymaster, who converted it into a permanent terrorist threat. It was from these dispatches that ‘Behind the Scenes in America’ had been culled.

  Like all con artists, Le Caron was a good actor, and he saw Anderson as an easy touch. Substantial amounts of cash found their way into the little spy’s bank account at Braidwood, Illinois. On occasion these sums were so huge they attracted the attention of the local Sheriff and Postmaster. ‘He frequently received large British money orders from England,’ said the Sheriff, ‘and in addition to this received large bank drafts from time to time through the Braidwood Bank. He said it was the rent from estates owned by him.’

  All of this was actually secret and unauthorised money literally embezzled from the British state. Le Caron had been duping Anderson for a quarter of a century, and thus by osmosis duping the British people who had to pay for his fabrications. ‘But he would not touch Fenian money,’ was Anderson’s later bleat. In fact Le Caron took $179 a month from those he spied on, as a ‘Major and Military Organiser of the Irish Republican Army’. Apart from blood money and barrowloads of cash from the British, he was also on the take from the Canadian government. It’s indicative of his crippled morality that he took his sobriquet of ‘Major’ from the Irish Republicans. US Army records reveal a less glamorous truth.

  According to these documents, Le Caron was born in Paris in 1841, of French parents, and served on the Union side in the American Civil War as a hospital orderly and bugler. The same records describe him as a ‘mutineer’ who ‘refused to march’ before the battle of Merfreeborough, and ended up in jail at Nashville because of it. Imprisonment didn’t seem to affect his subsequent promotion, and by the war’s end he’d ascended to the rank of Second Lieutenant.

  In reality, Le Caron wasn’t a major, wasn’t French, and his name wasn’t even Henri Le Caron. When he got into court, Sir Charles Russell called him a ‘living lie’, ridiculing him with disparaging emphasis on his true name. It was Thomas Beach (Russell’s emphasis), and he was born at the aspirant edge of the lower middle class in Colchester, Essex. In his early teens he split for Paris, travelling on money he’d stolen from his sister’s charity collection box. From France he shipped to the United States. If we’re to believe what came to be known as ‘Anderson’s Fairy Tales’, Beach wrote to his father in the 1860s condemning the burgeoning movement of Irish/American nationalism. His letter was apparently forwarded by his dad, circuitously finding its way to Anderson, and the Major’s career in ‘espionage’ began.

  About twenty years later in London, Anderson introduced Beach to Houston, ‘a man he could trust implicitly’. The trio then went about the business of selecting the most damaging ‘evidence’ they could discover against Parnell from the vast archive of mail accrued over years of exchange between himself and Anderson. ‘Apart from the Le Caron disclosures,’ wrote Anderson, ‘I repeat I had nothing to do with The Times case [and] I must premise that Le Caron’s evidence was my only point of contact with the case for The Times.’

  Notwithstanding these astronomical lies, about a hundred letters were chosen and organised for the coppers’ nark to take before the Commission. Le Caron, or Beach, as Russell spat it, was undoubtedly the best witness the Crown could muster, but it was to no avail. In the wake of Pigott, a celestial intervention couldn’t have saved the government’s case, and neither could the Major. The New York Times put the final nail in:

  For all its avowed and immediate purposes the testimony [of Beach] is a complete failure … so far from showing that PARNELL or his associates in parliament were privy to the dynamite plots on this side of the water, it furnishes evidence as strong as negative evidence can be made that these plots were undertaken without any connivance or any knowledge on the part of the Irish parliamentary leaders. A spy who had been on intimate terms with the plotters for twenty years was not able to adduce any testimony that raised a reasonable suspicion of their complicity. The spy’s testimony really disposes of The Times’ charges against PARNELL.

  Beach’s fee was ten grand, and Houston got thirty thousand. Added to this were enormous legal costs of over £200,000. It was a ‘foul conspiracy’ that all but bankrupted The Times. For a nation given to bragging about the superiority of its judicial institutions, it’s a task to believe this could have happened; and it couldn’t have happened had not those same institutions, including Scotland Yard, been irrefutably corrupt.

  There are two theories of history, the ‘cock-up’ and the ‘conspiracy’. This was both. It was a conspiracy that cocked up. A majority of Ripperologists don’t care much for the word ‘conspiracy’, fearing, I suspect, mission-creep into the unfathomable purity of ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’. But one day, even if it takes a thousand tomorrows, they’re going to have to come to terms with ‘the Conspiracy of Jack the Ripper’.

  Two thoughts occur. The first is the laughable prattle put about at the time of Warren’s ‘resignation’. It will be remembered that he was accused of having ‘broken the rules’ by writing for the press, a dispatch about as controversial as a twelve-month warranty for a garden rake. And second, a comparison between that and Anderson’s contributions to The Times. Lying if he was awake, Anderson was unworthy even to look at a policeman’s badge. ‘He had made many statements,’ said T.P. O’Connor, ‘calculated to interfere with the course of justice. I regard him as the symbol and outcome and the standard bearer of a bad and false and rotten system.’

  It was Sir Robert Anderson, KCB (Knight Commander of the Bath) LL.D (Doctor of Laws), who gave Ripperology one of its most cherished candidates: the Generic Jew. ‘In saying that he was a Polish Jew,’ wrote the Pulpiteer, ‘I am merely stating a
definitely ascertained fact’ – or put another way, merely lying through his teeth. For years Ripperology interpreted this balls as referring to Aaron Kosminski, then when that fell to pieces it widened the debate to include another nutty Yid called David Cohen. I’ll leave it to them and Anderson. His explanation of why this ‘definitely ascertained’ Polish Jew wasn’t arrested is even more ridiculous. ‘The only person who ever had a good view of the murderer,’ he wrote, ‘unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.’

  That must have been annoying. What an obstreperous cad. Maybe the police should have pleaded, taken him out for a slap-up dinner, whisky on the house? Failing that, they could have applied the law. As a ‘Doctor of Laws’, Anderson should surely have known what the law was. Anyway, what the hell, he was only chief of CID, and apparently no one bothered to tell him there were harsh penalties for denying the cops such evidence. It’s a little late in the day, but here it is, Chapter III/(3) under ‘Stephen’s Commentaries on the Laws of England’:

  An accessory AFTER the fact is one who knowing a felony to have been committed, receives, relieves, comforts, or assists the felon. To make such an accessory, it is in the first place requisite, that a felony has been committed, and that it was committed, to the knowledge of the accessory, by the party in question. Any assistance whatever makes the assistor an accessory. [Under] the ‘Accessories and Abettors Act, 1861’, accessories after the fact, in the case of murder, may be punished by penal servitude for life.

  What an awful pill it is that Anderson didn’t apply the law. We’d have all known who the Ripper was 130 years ago. Except it was all so much Anderson bullshit, and the only surprise is that he didn’t accuse Charles Parnell. In reaction to his half-witted imputations, the Jewish Chronicle wrote: ‘I fail to see upon what evidence, worthy of the name, he ventures to cast the odium for this infamy upon one of our people.’ It’s called ‘anti-Semitism’. There was no evidence. Anderson was playing it for the gullible. Apart from inventing this Kosminski nonsense and lying about ‘Israel Schwartz’s’ appearance at a coroner’s court, Anderson’s participation in attempting to interrupt the career of Jack the Ripper was zero.